Libya`s ``Government`` in Disarray After Largest Party Quits ``Congress``

blackascoal

The Force is With Me
NATO's invasion and destruction of peaceful Libya was a crime against humanity and there is no end in sight of the ensuing calamity.

Just another of Obama's needless wars for profit.

Now he's off to Mali to destroy yet another African nation.

Libya`s ``Government`` in Disarray After Largest Party Quits ``Congress``

The so-called General National Congress which operates under `President` and long-time CIA operative terrorist Magarief is intended to show legitimacy to the illegal occupation regime. With the quitting of the largest party and its inability to hold sessions in security, the regime continues to fail to form any plausible government.

The so-called "government" of Ali Zaidan who has the title "Prime Minister" in the illegal occupation regime, has suffered yet another major set back in its ongoing inability to show any control over the country or legitimacy. The de jure government of Libya remains the Libyan Jamahiriya, however de facto the Jamahiriya has been suspended from operating with tens of thousands of political prisoners and one fifth of the population of Libya in exile.

The latest set back comes as the largest "party" in the "Congress" -- the National Forces Alliance -- has pulled out. Led by the Libyan "globalist banker stooge" Mahmoud Jibril, the National Forces Alliance – with 39 party seats the largest block within the 200-member General National Congress – has withdrawn from the assembly, in protest over “poor performance” and “unacceptable practices” in the illegal occupation regime's legislative body.

The withdrawal was announced on Sunday. In a statement, the NFA declared: “The Libyan people [with the exception of the majority who supported Libyan Leader Muammar Qadhafi and the Jamahiriya people's democracy] put their faith in our hands, and if we are not able to perform accordingly, we need to turn down the responsibility, lest we be considered oppressors. We needed to adopt this position in order to single out some of the shortcomings and we ask people to show their solidarity with us.”

This comes after realization by Jibril that the future of Libya is not with his foreign backers who face economic collapse, nor is the position of the illegal occupation regime in Libya tenable as resistance has reached a crescendo across the country. Jibril himself has retweeted resistance news from his Twitter account on at least one occasion in an attempt to win the support of the majority of Libyans who still wish for the return of the peace, democracy, socialism and unity of the Jamahiriya.

The declaration then listed some o its issues with Congress and its president, Mohamed Magarief. These included excessive delays in establishing the Constituent Assembly that will draft the Constitution and unilateral decisions by the presidency without consulting GNC members, thereby hindering Congress from carrying out its core functions.

The abrogation of the Sebha Declaration of People's Power of 2nd March 1977 which placed the Holy Qur'an as Law of Society in the Libyan Jamahiriya and its replacement by a western style "Constitution" designed to entrench capitalism, western indirect multi-party "democracy" and laws that favour the banking elite, remain a key priority of the foreign backers of Jibril's NFA.

The NFA also condemned what it described as the CIA-operative Megarief’s inaction in the face of security threats and violent disturbances of GNC sessions which take place on a regular basis ensuring that the so-called Congress cannot function. It also cited what it believed is a lack of standard procedures and rules to steer Congress meetings.

The harshness of the accusations reveals rising tensions within the legislature that can no longer be resolved. The Libyan people were accustomed to a democracy based upon People's Congresses in which they had full say in the running of their affairs but this people's authority had been undermined in recent years by Jibril and others who then supported the conspiracy to invade Libya after a year-long bombing campaign carried out by the U.S.-European NATO alliance and its forces.

At a press conference on Monday, party members returned to the stalled decision on the Constituent Assembly, which they said had been repeatedly pushed back, far beyond the extension period provided for in the 2011 constitutional declaration. Most of the members are themselves in favour of the change of Libya's constitution as they hail mostly from outside Libya having lived in exile during the Al-Fateh Revolution and wish to erase all progress achieved by the Jamahiriya.

The official head of the NFA in Congress, Ibrahim Al-Ghariani, said it was a temporary withdrawal until demands were met, according to AFP.

The NFA says it is taking a decisive stance against unjustified meddling in Congress affairs by Magarief who returned to Libya only after the invasion of Tripoli late 2011, after joining the CIA and heading a terrorist organization against the Libyan Jamahiriya since 1980. It also laments the putting of the constitutional issue back on the agenda. Various U.S. "experts" have been pushing a western-style constitution upon the Libyan people in which they will have little or no say in its formation.

Some analysts say the withdrawal from the regime's Congress reflects not only pent-up frustrations among NFA delegates, at the GNC’s slow and tedious decision-making process, but also their loss of leverage, in comparison to other political forces that have gained influence since Congress was elected.

No pro-democracy, pro-Jamahiriya or pro-Green Book (Qadhafi's ideology, the Third Universal Theory) delegates are allowed to participate in any elections, legislature or authority in the "New Libya" which the regime is seeking to establish. Thus the Congress contains only anti-Jamahiriya parties and individuals which favour western style indirect democracy.

Since more than two years of occupation the foreign powers and their local allies have been unable to form any legitimate or functional government.
http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=632350
 
So let me get this straight, you are characterising France's attack on Al Queda, thus thwarting their attempt to capture Konna, a bad thing. It wasn't that long ago that you said the CIA were in league with AQ. So are you in favour of a Sharia based theocracy in Mali as the Islamists have declared their aim?
 
So let me get this straight, you are characterising France's attack on Al Queda, thus thwarting their attempt to capture Konna, a bad thing. It wasn't that long ago that you said the CIA were in league with AQ. So are you in favour of a Sharia based theocracy in Mali as the Islamists have declared their aim?

You don't get it .. but you seem real fond of intervention, so you may never get it.

Your question about Sharia Law highlights your ignorance of the issue. THERE WAS NO SHARIA LAW IN LIBYA UNDER GADDAFI. That came with Obama's Al Queda posse, the so-called 'rebels.' Were you concerned about Sharia Law then?

Al Queda is anything we want to call Al Queda. Anybody on the opposite side of profit is Al Queda.

Al Queda is the excuse to invade small countries and mass-murder its citizens.

Al Queda is the excuse for France and the West to attack Mali.

Mali, Unintended Consequences, and Endless War

CBS News reported the ”United States is providing communications and transport help for an international military intervention aimed at wresting Mali’s north out of the hands of Islamist extremists.” Though the mission is taking place in a “lawless desert in weakly governed country,” French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the operation was “gaining international backing. The US was providing communications and transportation support.

On January 12, “US officials” told CBS “they had offered to send drones to Mali.” Drones excel in weakly governed and lawless deserts and lawless parts of countries it seems such parts are where the US likes to use drones the most.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “France asked Washington late last week to deploy unmanned aerial drones and aircraft that could be used to refuel French fighter planes in the air. Paris also asked the US to provide satellite imagery and share intercepts of militants’ communications.”

According to WSJ, unnamed US officials told the newspaper the role of America “would be non-lethal in nature, focused on intelligence collection and providing other support to French and any allied African forces.” But drones were used to carry out strikes in Libya in 2011 and mission creep could easily lead to a situation where military drones were not just providing non-lethal tactical support to enable French military operations.”

Also, Tom Vanden Brook of USA TODAY reported, “US military warplanes assisted French forces battling Islamic extremists in two African countries over the weekend, according to the Pentagon, highlighting the growing threat of al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the region.”

It is important to remember, as I wrote almost a year ago, that the unrest in Mali that is now the excuse for Western military intervention is a direct consequence of the US-NATO war in Libya in 2011. Former Gadhafi militias, including lots of Tuaregs from northern Mali, returned after an influx of arms flooded Libya. The resulting unrest led to a military coup - led by by Captain Amadou Sanogo, trained by the US military - against President Amadou Toumani Toure. So not only did the rise of Islamist rebels in Mali result directly from a separate US war in Muslim lands, but the subsequent collapse of the Malian government was instigated by militias that were trained and armed by the US.

“Over and over, western intervention ends up – whether by ineptitude or design – sowing the seeds of further intervention,” writes Glenn Greenwald, with regard to the intervention in Mali. “Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies,” Greenwald adds. “Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.”

Walter Russell Mead writes at The American Interest that Obama’s “counter-terrorism” policies in North Africa have failed catastrophically:

Since Obama took office the US spent almost $600 million to combat Islamic militancy across North Africa. In countries like Mali and Niger US forces trained local soldiers in counterterrorism skills. Arms and equipment were bought so local governments could protect their territories. This strategy, in theory, would protect North Africa from falling into the hands of Islamist militants—who would impose strict Sharia rule on unwilling locals and use lawless territory to launch attacks on Western targets—without involving a heavy deployment of American troops like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was the theory. But as heavily armed Islamist militants battle French forces in the Battle for Mali, it’s clear Obama’s strategy to help weak North African states protect themselves from terrorists has failed catastrophically.

“This has been brewing for five years,” one US special ops officer told the NYT. “The analysts got complacent in their assumptions and did not see the big changes and the impacts of them, like the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic” fighters who came in from Libya.

The New York Times reports that some US officials believe a Western assault on Mali “could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe.”

Indeed what has been happening in the news is revealing: the French-led air assaults seem to have emboldened the Islamist fighters. Either Mali becomes a long lasting military quagmire, or a misleadingly quick mission leads to even worse blowback somewhere else in Africa’s Sahel region, prompting yet another Western intervention.
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/01/14/mali-unintended-consequences-and-endless-war/
 
The bombing of Mali highlights all the lessons of western intervention

The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims - after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.

First, as the New York Times' background account from this morning makes clear, much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in Libya. Specifically, "heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya" and "the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back" played the precipitating role in the collapse of the US-supported central government. As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column this morning in the Independent:

"This intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . . [T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback."

Over and over, western intervention ends up - whether by ineptitude or design - sowing the seeds of further intervention. Given the massive instability still plaguing Libya as well as enduring anger over the Benghazi attack, how long will it be before we hear that bombing and invasions in that country are - once again - necessary to combat the empowered "Islamist" forces there: forces empowered as a result of the Nato overthrow of that country's government?

Second, the overthrow of the Malian government was enabled by US-trained-and-armed soldiers who defected. From the NYT: "commanders of this nation's elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials." And then: "an American-trained officer overthrew Mali's elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists."

In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.

Third, western bombing of Muslims in yet another country will obviously provoke even more anti-western sentiment, the fuel of terrorism. Already, as the Guardian reports, French fighter jets in Mali have killed "at least 11 civilians including three children". France's long history of colonialization in Mali only exacerbates the inevitable anger. Back in December, after the UN Security Council authorized the intervention in Mali, Amnesty International's researcher on West Africa, Salvatore Saguès, warned: "An international armed intervention is likely to increase the scale of human rights violations we are already seeing in this conflict."

As always, western governments are well aware of this consequence and yet proceed anyway. The NYT notes that the French bombing campaign was launched "in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe." Indeed, at the same time that the French are now killing civilians in Mali, a joint French-US raid in Somalia caused the deaths of "at least eight civilians, including two women and two children".

To believe that the US and its allies can just continue to go around the world, in country after country, and bomb and kill innocent people - Muslims - and not be targeted with "terrorist" attacks is, for obvious reasons, lunacy. As Bradford University professor Paul Rogers told Jones, the bombing of Mali "will be portrayed as 'one more example of an assault on Islam'". Whatever hopes that may exist for an end to the "war on terror" are systematically destroyed by ongoing aggression.

Fourth, for all the self-flattering rhetoric that western democracies love to apply to themselves, it is extraordinary how these wars are waged without any pretense of democratic process. Writing about the participation of the British government in the military assault on Mali, Jones notes that "it is disturbing – to say the least – how Cameron has led Britain into Mali's conflict without even a pretence at consultation." Identically, the Washington Post this morning reports that President Obama has acknowledged after the fact that US fighter jets entered Somali air space as part of the French operation there; the Post called that "a rare public acknowledgment of American combat operations in the Horn of Africa" and described the anti-democratic secrecy that typically surrounds US war actions in the region:

"The US military has based a growing number of armed Predator drones as well as F-15 fighter jets at Camp Lemonnier, which has grown into a key installation for secret counterterrorism operations in Somalia and Yemen. The defense official declined to identify the aircraft used in the rescue attempt but said they were fighter jets, not drones. . . . .

"It was unclear, however, why Obama felt compelled to reveal this particular operation when he has remained silent about other specific US combat missions in Somalia. Spokesmen from the White House and the Pentagon declined to elaborate or answer questions Sunday night."

The Obama administration has, of course, draped its entire drone and global assassination campaign in an impenetrable cloth of secrecy, ensuring it remains beyond the scrutinizing reach of media outlets, courts, and its own citizens. The US and its western allies do not merely wage endless war aimed invariably at Muslims. They do so in virtually complete secrecy, without any transparency or accountability. Meet the western "democracies".

Finally, the propaganda used to justify all of this is depressingly common yet wildly effective. Any western government that wants to bomb Muslims simply slaps the label of "terrorists" on them, and any real debate or critical assessment instantly ends before it can even begin. "The president is totally determined that we must eradicate these terrorists who threaten the security of Mali, our own country and Europe," proclaimed French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

As usual, this simplistic cartoon script distorts reality more than it describes it. There is no doubt that the Malian rebels have engaged in all sorts of heinous atrocities ("amputations, flogging, and stoning to death for those who oppose their interpretation of Islam"), but so, too, have Malian government forces - including, as Amnesty chronicled, "arresting, torturing and killing Tuareg people apparently only on ethnic ground." As Jones aptly warns: "don't fall for a narrative so often pushed by the Western media: a perverse oversimplification of good fighting evil, just as we have seen imposed on Syria's brutal civil war."

The French bombing of Mali, perhaps to include some form of US participation, illustrates every lesson of western intervention. The "war on terror" is a self-perpetuating war precisely because it endlessly engenders its own enemies and provides the fuel to ensure that the fire rages without end. But the sloganeering propaganda used to justify this is so cheap and easy - we must kill the Terrorists! - that it's hard to see what will finally cause this to end. The blinding fear - not just of violence, but of Otherness - that has been successfully implanted in the minds of many western citizens is such that this single, empty word (Terrorists), standing alone, is sufficient to generate unquestioning support for whatever their governments do in its name, no matter how secret or unaccompanied by evidence it may be.
 
You don't get it .. but you seem real fond of intervention, so you may never get it.

Your question about Sharia Law highlights your ignorance of the issue. THERE WAS NO SHARIA LAW IN LIBYA UNDER GADDAFI. That came with Obama's Al Queda posse, the so-called 'rebels.' Were you concerned about Sharia Law then?

Al Queda is anything we want to call Al Queda. Anybody on the opposite side of profit is Al Queda.

Al Queda is the excuse to invade small countries and mass-murder its citizens.

Al Queda is the excuse for France and the West to attack Mali.

Mali, Unintended Consequences, and Endless War

CBS News reported the ”United States is providing communications and transport help for an international military intervention aimed at wresting Mali’s north out of the hands of Islamist extremists.” Though the mission is taking place in a “lawless desert in weakly governed country,” French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said the operation was “gaining international backing. The US was providing communications and transportation support.

On January 12, “US officials” told CBS “they had offered to send drones to Mali.” Drones excel in weakly governed and lawless deserts and lawless parts of countries it seems such parts are where the US likes to use drones the most.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “France asked Washington late last week to deploy unmanned aerial drones and aircraft that could be used to refuel French fighter planes in the air. Paris also asked the US to provide satellite imagery and share intercepts of militants’ communications.”

According to WSJ, unnamed US officials told the newspaper the role of America “would be non-lethal in nature, focused on intelligence collection and providing other support to French and any allied African forces.” But drones were used to carry out strikes in Libya in 2011 and mission creep could easily lead to a situation where military drones were not just providing non-lethal tactical support to enable French military operations.”

Also, Tom Vanden Brook of USA TODAY reported, “US military warplanes assisted French forces battling Islamic extremists in two African countries over the weekend, according to the Pentagon, highlighting the growing threat of al Qaeda-linked terrorists in the region.”

It is important to remember, as I wrote almost a year ago, that the unrest in Mali that is now the excuse for Western military intervention is a direct consequence of the US-NATO war in Libya in 2011. Former Gadhafi militias, including lots of Tuaregs from northern Mali, returned after an influx of arms flooded Libya. The resulting unrest led to a military coup - led by by Captain Amadou Sanogo, trained by the US military - against President Amadou Toumani Toure. So not only did the rise of Islamist rebels in Mali result directly from a separate US war in Muslim lands, but the subsequent collapse of the Malian government was instigated by militias that were trained and armed by the US.

“Over and over, western intervention ends up – whether by ineptitude or design – sowing the seeds of further intervention,” writes Glenn Greenwald, with regard to the intervention in Mali. “Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies,” Greenwald adds. “Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.”

Walter Russell Mead writes at The American Interest that Obama’s “counter-terrorism” policies in North Africa have failed catastrophically:

Since Obama took office the US spent almost $600 million to combat Islamic militancy across North Africa. In countries like Mali and Niger US forces trained local soldiers in counterterrorism skills. Arms and equipment were bought so local governments could protect their territories. This strategy, in theory, would protect North Africa from falling into the hands of Islamist militants—who would impose strict Sharia rule on unwilling locals and use lawless territory to launch attacks on Western targets—without involving a heavy deployment of American troops like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That was the theory. But as heavily armed Islamist militants battle French forces in the Battle for Mali, it’s clear Obama’s strategy to help weak North African states protect themselves from terrorists has failed catastrophically.

“This has been brewing for five years,” one US special ops officer told the NYT. “The analysts got complacent in their assumptions and did not see the big changes and the impacts of them, like the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic” fighters who came in from Libya.

The New York Times reports that some US officials believe a Western assault on Mali “could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe.”

Indeed what has been happening in the news is revealing: the French-led air assaults seem to have emboldened the Islamist fighters. Either Mali becomes a long lasting military quagmire, or a misleadingly quick mission leads to even worse blowback somewhere else in Africa’s Sahel region, prompting yet another Western intervention.
http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/01/14/mali-unintended-consequences-and-endless-war/

"Al Queda is anything we want to call Al Queda. Anybody on the opposite side of profit is Al Queda.

Al Queda is the excuse to invade small countries and mass-murder its citizens.

Al Queda is the excuse for France and the West to attack Mali."


Exactly! They make Al Queda out to be some huge multi-national, world-encompassing organization when it's been shown such is not the case. They used the same bullshit with Saddam and Iraq saying Saddam was in league with Al Queda. Slap the designation "Al Queda" on any group or person and anything goes.

Unfortunately, some people never smarten up regardless of the facts presented.
 
The bombing of Mali highlights all the lessons of western intervention

The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims - after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.

First, as the New York Times' background account from this morning makes clear, much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in Libya. Specifically, "heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya" and "the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back" played the precipitating role in the collapse of the US-supported central government. As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column this morning in the Independent:

"This intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . . [T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback."

Over and over, western intervention ends up - whether by ineptitude or design - sowing the seeds of further intervention. Given the massive instability still plaguing Libya as well as enduring anger over the Benghazi attack, how long will it be before we hear that bombing and invasions in that country are - once again - necessary to combat the empowered "Islamist" forces there: forces empowered as a result of the Nato overthrow of that country's government?

Second, the overthrow of the Malian government was enabled by US-trained-and-armed soldiers who defected. From the NYT: "commanders of this nation's elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials." And then: "an American-trained officer overthrew Mali's elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists."

In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.

Third, western bombing of Muslims in yet another country will obviously provoke even more anti-western sentiment, the fuel of terrorism. Already, as the Guardian reports, French fighter jets in Mali have killed "at least 11 civilians including three children". France's long history of colonialization in Mali only exacerbates the inevitable anger. Back in December, after the UN Security Council authorized the intervention in Mali, Amnesty International's researcher on West Africa, Salvatore Saguès, warned: "An international armed intervention is likely to increase the scale of human rights violations we are already seeing in this conflict."

As always, western governments are well aware of this consequence and yet proceed anyway. The NYT notes that the French bombing campaign was launched "in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe." Indeed, at the same time that the French are now killing civilians in Mali, a joint French-US raid in Somalia caused the deaths of "at least eight civilians, including two women and two children".

To believe that the US and its allies can just continue to go around the world, in country after country, and bomb and kill innocent people - Muslims - and not be targeted with "terrorist" attacks is, for obvious reasons, lunacy. As Bradford University professor Paul Rogers told Jones, the bombing of Mali "will be portrayed as 'one more example of an assault on Islam'". Whatever hopes that may exist for an end to the "war on terror" are systematically destroyed by ongoing aggression.

Fourth, for all the self-flattering rhetoric that western democracies love to apply to themselves, it is extraordinary how these wars are waged without any pretense of democratic process. Writing about the participation of the British government in the military assault on Mali, Jones notes that "it is disturbing – to say the least – how Cameron has led Britain into Mali's conflict without even a pretence at consultation." Identically, the Washington Post this morning reports that President Obama has acknowledged after the fact that US fighter jets entered Somali air space as part of the French operation there; the Post called that "a rare public acknowledgment of American combat operations in the Horn of Africa" and described the anti-democratic secrecy that typically surrounds US war actions in the region:

"The US military has based a growing number of armed Predator drones as well as F-15 fighter jets at Camp Lemonnier, which has grown into a key installation for secret counterterrorism operations in Somalia and Yemen. The defense official declined to identify the aircraft used in the rescue attempt but said they were fighter jets, not drones. . . . .

"It was unclear, however, why Obama felt compelled to reveal this particular operation when he has remained silent about other specific US combat missions in Somalia. Spokesmen from the White House and the Pentagon declined to elaborate or answer questions Sunday night."

The Obama administration has, of course, draped its entire drone and global assassination campaign in an impenetrable cloth of secrecy, ensuring it remains beyond the scrutinizing reach of media outlets, courts, and its own citizens. The US and its western allies do not merely wage endless war aimed invariably at Muslims. They do so in virtually complete secrecy, without any transparency or accountability. Meet the western "democracies".

Finally, the propaganda used to justify all of this is depressingly common yet wildly effective. Any western government that wants to bomb Muslims simply slaps the label of "terrorists" on them, and any real debate or critical assessment instantly ends before it can even begin. "The president is totally determined that we must eradicate these terrorists who threaten the security of Mali, our own country and Europe," proclaimed French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

As usual, this simplistic cartoon script distorts reality more than it describes it. There is no doubt that the Malian rebels have engaged in all sorts of heinous atrocities ("amputations, flogging, and stoning to death for those who oppose their interpretation of Islam"), but so, too, have Malian government forces - including, as Amnesty chronicled, "arresting, torturing and killing Tuareg people apparently only on ethnic ground." As Jones aptly warns: "don't fall for a narrative so often pushed by the Western media: a perverse oversimplification of good fighting evil, just as we have seen imposed on Syria's brutal civil war."

The French bombing of Mali, perhaps to include some form of US participation, illustrates every lesson of western intervention. The "war on terror" is a self-perpetuating war precisely because it endlessly engenders its own enemies and provides the fuel to ensure that the fire rages without end. But the sloganeering propaganda used to justify this is so cheap and easy - we must kill the Terrorists! - that it's hard to see what will finally cause this to end. The blinding fear - not just of violence, but of Otherness - that has been successfully implanted in the minds of many western citizens is such that this single, empty word (Terrorists), standing alone, is sufficient to generate unquestioning support for whatever their governments do in its name, no matter how secret or unaccompanied by evidence it may be.

"In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them."

It's a make work program. Arms sales. Nothing more.
 

"Al Queda is anything we want to call Al Queda. Anybody on the opposite side of profit is Al Queda.

Al Queda is the excuse to invade small countries and mass-murder its citizens.

Al Queda is the excuse for France and the West to attack Mali."


Exactly! They make Al Queda out to be some huge multi-national, world-encompassing organization when it's been shown such is not the case. They used the same bullshit with Saddam and Iraq saying Saddam was in league with Al Queda. Slap the designation "Al Queda" on any group or person and anything goes.

Unfortunately, some people never smarten up regardless of the facts presented.

Truer words never spoken.

You can slap 'Al Queda' on an American, then just kill him/her without trial.

It appears that we've learned nothing.
 
You don't get it .. but you seem real fond of intervention, so you may never get it.

Your question about Sharia Law highlights your ignorance of the issue. THERE WAS NO SHARIA LAW IN LIBYA UNDER GADDAFI. That came with Obama's Al Queda posse, the so-called 'rebels.' Were you concerned about Sharia Law then?

Al Queda is anything we want to call Al Queda. Anybody on the opposite side of profit is Al Queda.

Al Queda is the excuse to invade small countries and mass-murder its citizens.

Al Queda is the excuse for France and the West to attack Mali.

I know a hell of a lot more about Libya than you realise as I known many people, mostly field engineers who worked there in the 80's and early 90's. I also know a woman friend whose father worked in Libya for a long time and she spent several years there when she was in her teens. I also know that there many on the Left that idolise Gaddafi, you are just one of many, and conveniently gloss over his despotic past. You also seem to be able to invoke the name of Al Queda when it suits you as when you claimed that Benghazi is heaving with AQ and in cahoots with the CIA.

If present day Libya is so bad then why are there so many Italians opening gelaterias in Tripoli?

Since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, Libyans have begun a love affair with ice cream. It is often said that to taste real gelato, one needs to go to Italy; but now its former colony Libya may well be en route to becoming another ice cream haven. Never before has the decadent Italian influence on Libya been more visible. Before the revolution, there were only a handful of ice cream shops, known as gelaterias, in the capital, Tripoli.

Continue reading the main story


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20850246
 
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I know a hell of a lot more about Libya than you realise as I known many people, mostly field engineers who worked there in the 80's and early 90's. I also know a woman whose father worked in Libya for a long time and she spent several years there when she was in her teens. I also know that there many on the Left that idolise Gaddafi, you are just one of many, and conveniently gloss over his despotic past. If present day Libya is so bad then why are there so many Italians opening gelaterias in Tripoli?

Continue reading the main story


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20850246

With all due respect, it doesn't matter a hill of beans what you think you know about Libya.

The video conclusively demonstrated the horror we visited upon innocent people .. and you're talking about ice cream.

What is seen in the video is what NATO and people like you would call "humanitarian." I call it a crime against humanity.

You'll have no interest in this .. but for others reading, here is what Libyans enjoyed and what their country looked like before NATO's "humanitarianism."


Americans would have an orgasm just thinking about getting that from our government .. and so would yours.

Look at how beautiful the city is .. and there if Gaddafi, riding around the city in an open car. Would Obama do that? Tell me again about how much he was hated.

AND, here is the lie of Obama and NATO exposed in under 30 seconds ..


It doesn't matter what you think you know about Libya.

Truth doesn't require your perspective. It's right there in your face.
 
NATO's invasion and destruction of peaceful Libya was a crime against humanity and there is no end in sight of the ensuing calamity.

Just another of Obama's needless wars for profit.

Now he's off to Mali to destroy yet another African nation.

Libya`s ``Government`` in Disarray After Largest Party Quits ``Congress``

The so-called General National Congress which operates under `President` and long-time CIA operative terrorist Magarief is intended to show legitimacy to the illegal occupation regime. With the quitting of the largest party and its inability to hold sessions in security, the regime continues to fail to form any plausible government.

The so-called "government" of Ali Zaidan who has the title "Prime Minister" in the illegal occupation regime, has suffered yet another major set back in its ongoing inability to show any control over the country or legitimacy. The de jure government of Libya remains the Libyan Jamahiriya, however de facto the Jamahiriya has been suspended from operating with tens of thousands of political prisoners and one fifth of the population of Libya in exile.

The latest set back comes as the largest "party" in the "Congress" -- the National Forces Alliance -- has pulled out. Led by the Libyan "globalist banker stooge" Mahmoud Jibril, the National Forces Alliance – with 39 party seats the largest block within the 200-member General National Congress – has withdrawn from the assembly, in protest over “poor performance” and “unacceptable practices” in the illegal occupation regime's legislative body.

The withdrawal was announced on Sunday. In a statement, the NFA declared: “The Libyan people [with the exception of the majority who supported Libyan Leader Muammar Qadhafi and the Jamahiriya people's democracy] put their faith in our hands, and if we are not able to perform accordingly, we need to turn down the responsibility, lest we be considered oppressors. We needed to adopt this position in order to single out some of the shortcomings and we ask people to show their solidarity with us.”

This comes after realization by Jibril that the future of Libya is not with his foreign backers who face economic collapse, nor is the position of the illegal occupation regime in Libya tenable as resistance has reached a crescendo across the country. Jibril himself has retweeted resistance news from his Twitter account on at least one occasion in an attempt to win the support of the majority of Libyans who still wish for the return of the peace, democracy, socialism and unity of the Jamahiriya.

The declaration then listed some o its issues with Congress and its president, Mohamed Magarief. These included excessive delays in establishing the Constituent Assembly that will draft the Constitution and unilateral decisions by the presidency without consulting GNC members, thereby hindering Congress from carrying out its core functions.

The abrogation of the Sebha Declaration of People's Power of 2nd March 1977 which placed the Holy Qur'an as Law of Society in the Libyan Jamahiriya and its replacement by a western style "Constitution" designed to entrench capitalism, western indirect multi-party "democracy" and laws that favour the banking elite, remain a key priority of the foreign backers of Jibril's NFA.

The NFA also condemned what it described as the CIA-operative Megarief’s inaction in the face of security threats and violent disturbances of GNC sessions which take place on a regular basis ensuring that the so-called Congress cannot function. It also cited what it believed is a lack of standard procedures and rules to steer Congress meetings.

The harshness of the accusations reveals rising tensions within the legislature that can no longer be resolved. The Libyan people were accustomed to a democracy based upon People's Congresses in which they had full say in the running of their affairs but this people's authority had been undermined in recent years by Jibril and others who then supported the conspiracy to invade Libya after a year-long bombing campaign carried out by the U.S.-European NATO alliance and its forces.

At a press conference on Monday, party members returned to the stalled decision on the Constituent Assembly, which they said had been repeatedly pushed back, far beyond the extension period provided for in the 2011 constitutional declaration. Most of the members are themselves in favour of the change of Libya's constitution as they hail mostly from outside Libya having lived in exile during the Al-Fateh Revolution and wish to erase all progress achieved by the Jamahiriya.

The official head of the NFA in Congress, Ibrahim Al-Ghariani, said it was a temporary withdrawal until demands were met, according to AFP.

The NFA says it is taking a decisive stance against unjustified meddling in Congress affairs by Magarief who returned to Libya only after the invasion of Tripoli late 2011, after joining the CIA and heading a terrorist organization against the Libyan Jamahiriya since 1980. It also laments the putting of the constitutional issue back on the agenda. Various U.S. "experts" have been pushing a western-style constitution upon the Libyan people in which they will have little or no say in its formation.

Some analysts say the withdrawal from the regime's Congress reflects not only pent-up frustrations among NFA delegates, at the GNC’s slow and tedious decision-making process, but also their loss of leverage, in comparison to other political forces that have gained influence since Congress was elected.

No pro-democracy, pro-Jamahiriya or pro-Green Book (Qadhafi's ideology, the Third Universal Theory) delegates are allowed to participate in any elections, legislature or authority in the "New Libya" which the regime is seeking to establish. Thus the Congress contains only anti-Jamahiriya parties and individuals which favour western style indirect democracy.

Since more than two years of occupation the foreign powers and their local allies have been unable to form any legitimate or functional government.
http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=632350

I thought the "GREAT LEADER" had everything under control in Libya.
 
With all due respect, it doesn't matter a hill of beans what you think you know about Libya.

The video conclusively demonstrated the horror we visited upon innocent people .. and you're talking about ice cream.

What is seen in the video is what NATO and people like you would call "humanitarian." I call it a crime against humanity.

You'll have no interest in this .. but for others reading, here is what Libyans enjoyed and what their country looked like before NATO's "humanitarianism."


Americans would have an orgasm just thinking about getting that from our government .. and so would yours.

Look at how beautiful the city is .. and there if Gaddafi, riding around the city in an open car. Would Obama do that? Tell me again about how much he was hated.

AND, here is the lie of Obama and NATO exposed in under 30 seconds ..


It doesn't matter what you think you know about Libya.

Truth doesn't require your perspective. It's right there in your face.

The point is that if Tripoli was the hellhole that you are trying to depict then I very much doubt that Italian companies would be falling over themselves to open new gelaterias. As for that video of Gaddafi, you have shown that many times before. Who says that there were two million there in that square? How many of those people were there willingly and how many were his militias and henchmen? I am sure that Nicolae Ceaușescu or Enver Hoxha could gather similar numbers in the dying days of their despotic regimes as well.
 
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The bombing of Mali highlights all the lessons of western intervention

The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims - after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.

First, as the New York Times' background account from this morning makes clear, much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in Libya. Specifically, "heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya" and "the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back" played the precipitating role in the collapse of the US-supported central government. As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column this morning in the Independent:

"This intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . . [T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback."

Over and over, western intervention ends up - whether by ineptitude or design - sowing the seeds of further intervention. Given the massive instability still plaguing Libya as well as enduring anger over the Benghazi attack, how long will it be before we hear that bombing and invasions in that country are - once again - necessary to combat the empowered "Islamist" forces there: forces empowered as a result of the Nato overthrow of that country's government?

Second, the overthrow of the Malian government was enabled by US-trained-and-armed soldiers who defected. From the NYT: "commanders of this nation's elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials." And then: "an American-trained officer overthrew Mali's elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists."

In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.

Third, western bombing of Muslims in yet another country will obviously provoke even more anti-western sentiment, the fuel of terrorism. Already, as the Guardian reports, French fighter jets in Mali have killed "at least 11 civilians including three children". France's long history of colonialization in Mali only exacerbates the inevitable anger. Back in December, after the UN Security Council authorized the intervention in Mali, Amnesty International's researcher on West Africa, Salvatore Saguès, warned: "An international armed intervention is likely to increase the scale of human rights violations we are already seeing in this conflict."

As always, western governments are well aware of this consequence and yet proceed anyway. The NYT notes that the French bombing campaign was launched "in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist attacks as far away as Europe." Indeed, at the same time that the French are now killing civilians in Mali, a joint French-US raid in Somalia caused the deaths of "at least eight civilians, including two women and two children".

To believe that the US and its allies can just continue to go around the world, in country after country, and bomb and kill innocent people - Muslims - and not be targeted with "terrorist" attacks is, for obvious reasons, lunacy. As Bradford University professor Paul Rogers told Jones, the bombing of Mali "will be portrayed as 'one more example of an assault on Islam'". Whatever hopes that may exist for an end to the "war on terror" are systematically destroyed by ongoing aggression.

Fourth, for all the self-flattering rhetoric that western democracies love to apply to themselves, it is extraordinary how these wars are waged without any pretense of democratic process. Writing about the participation of the British government in the military assault on Mali, Jones notes that "it is disturbing – to say the least – how Cameron has led Britain into Mali's conflict without even a pretence at consultation." Identically, the Washington Post this morning reports that President Obama has acknowledged after the fact that US fighter jets entered Somali air space as part of the French operation there; the Post called that "a rare public acknowledgment of American combat operations in the Horn of Africa" and described the anti-democratic secrecy that typically surrounds US war actions in the region:

"The US military has based a growing number of armed Predator drones as well as F-15 fighter jets at Camp Lemonnier, which has grown into a key installation for secret counterterrorism operations in Somalia and Yemen. The defense official declined to identify the aircraft used in the rescue attempt but said they were fighter jets, not drones. . . . .

"It was unclear, however, why Obama felt compelled to reveal this particular operation when he has remained silent about other specific US combat missions in Somalia. Spokesmen from the White House and the Pentagon declined to elaborate or answer questions Sunday night."

The Obama administration has, of course, draped its entire drone and global assassination campaign in an impenetrable cloth of secrecy, ensuring it remains beyond the scrutinizing reach of media outlets, courts, and its own citizens. The US and its western allies do not merely wage endless war aimed invariably at Muslims. They do so in virtually complete secrecy, without any transparency or accountability. Meet the western "democracies".

Finally, the propaganda used to justify all of this is depressingly common yet wildly effective. Any western government that wants to bomb Muslims simply slaps the label of "terrorists" on them, and any real debate or critical assessment instantly ends before it can even begin. "The president is totally determined that we must eradicate these terrorists who threaten the security of Mali, our own country and Europe," proclaimed French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

As usual, this simplistic cartoon script distorts reality more than it describes it. There is no doubt that the Malian rebels have engaged in all sorts of heinous atrocities ("amputations, flogging, and stoning to death for those who oppose their interpretation of Islam"), but so, too, have Malian government forces - including, as Amnesty chronicled, "arresting, torturing and killing Tuareg people apparently only on ethnic ground." As Jones aptly warns: "don't fall for a narrative so often pushed by the Western media: a perverse oversimplification of good fighting evil, just as we have seen imposed on Syria's brutal civil war."

The French bombing of Mali, perhaps to include some form of US participation, illustrates every lesson of western intervention. The "war on terror" is a self-perpetuating war precisely because it endlessly engenders its own enemies and provides the fuel to ensure that the fire rages without end. But the sloganeering propaganda used to justify this is so cheap and easy - we must kill the Terrorists! - that it's hard to see what will finally cause this to end. The blinding fear - not just of violence, but of Otherness - that has been successfully implanted in the minds of many western citizens is such that this single, empty word (Terrorists), standing alone, is sufficient to generate unquestioning support for whatever their governments do in its name, no matter how secret or unaccompanied by evidence it may be.

Creating our own endless list of enemies. "when will we ever learn, when we we ever learn, where have all the flowers gone?
 
The point is that if Tripoli was the hellhole that you are trying to depict then I very much doubt that Italian companies would be falling over themselves to open new gelaterias. As for that video of Gaddafi, you have shown that many times before. Who says that there were two million there in that square? How many of those people were there willingly and how many were his militias and henchmen? I am sure that Nicolae Ceaușescu or Enver Hoxha could gather similar numbers in the dying days of their despotic regimes as well.

That's stupid .. and again proves that you know nothing about Libya.

No matter how many times I show the videos, you won't have an answer for either of them. You never have. I show them because they completely disprove the bullshit "humanitarian" story .. which is every bit as false as the "rape" story .. and every bit as false as you know Libya.

I can see no purpose for you and I to continue this conversation. I'm a bit disgusted by your inhumanity.
 
That's stupid .. and again proves that you know nothing about Libya.

No matter how many times I show the videos, you won't have an answer for either of them. You never have. I show them because they completely disprove the bullshit "humanitarian" story .. which is every bit as false as the "rape" story .. and every bit as false as you know Libya.

I can see no purpose for you and I to continue this conversation. I'm a bit disgusted by your inhumanity.

So what do you imagine would have happened if Gaddafi had been allowed to lay siege to Benghazi and other Libyan cities? I suggest that you only need look to Syria for the answer. I'm sorry BAC but I thought you were a little more comfortable in your beliefs that you didn't feel the need to say "it's my ball and I don't want to play any more".
 
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So what do you imagine would have happened if Gaddafi had been allowed to lay siege to Benghazi and other Libyan cities? I suggest that you only need look to Syria for the answer. I'm sorry BAC but I thought you were a little more comfortable in your beliefs that you didn't feel the need to say "it's my ball and I don't want to play any more".

Gaddaffi did not lay sieze to ANY Libyan city .. even though he has known the threat from Benghazi for years. This wasn't their first attempt to overthrow him. Benghazi was the world's hotbed for terrorism and many of the so-called "rebels" admitted that they killed American troops in Iraq. If he had attacked Libya IT'S A CIVIL WAR.

Syria stands today BECAUSE the world has seen the horrors of NATO and its brand of "humanitarianism."

You even insist that American troops should stay in Afghanistan .. which is absolutely MINDLESS.

You call Gaddafi a despot. The "despot" who built the Great Man-Made River .. and he took better care of the Libyan people than the Queen takes care of you. Some "despot."

With all due respect, your comments reek of colonialism. I'm not suggesting that you are evil or unintelligent .. what I'm saying is that there are others here who share your colonialist thought. You should talk to them. I'm sure you can figure out the basis for my aversion to colonialist thought.

If you're such a warrior, why aren't you in the military .. maybe join the 25 or 30 troops the UK has committed to the wars that you're in love with?
 
Gaddaffi did not lay sieze to ANY Libyan city .. even though he has known the threat from Benghazi for years. This wasn't their first attempt to overthrow him. Benghazi was the world's hotbed for terrorism and many of the so-called "rebels" admitted that they killed American troops in Iraq. If he had attacked Libya IT'S A CIVIL WAR.

Syria stands today BECAUSE the world has seen the horrors of NATO and its brand of "humanitarianism."

You even insist that American troops should stay in Afghanistan .. which is absolutely MINDLESS.

You call Gaddafi a despot. The "despot" who built the Great Man-Made River .. and he took better care of the Libyan people than the Queen takes care of you. Some "despot."

With all due respect, your comments reek of colonialism. I'm not suggesting that you are evil or unintelligent .. what I'm saying is that there are others here who share your colonialist thought. You should talk to them. I'm sure you can figure out the basis for my aversion to colonialist thought.

If you're such a warrior, why aren't you in the military .. maybe join the 25 or 30 troops the UK has committed to the wars that you're in love with?

No, he didn't because he wasn't given the opportunity. As for your disparaging the UK contribution to the war in Afghanistan, that is just disgusting, uninformed and uncalled for in my opinion. It is the sort of bullshit I would expect from Darla, not from you! You seem to think that despots are incapable of building spectacular projects, so what about Hitler and Stalin? Isn't it a basic tenet of totalitarians to fill their citizen's stomachs so they needn't worry too much about politics??



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10629358
 
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No, he didn't because he wasn't given the opportunity. As for your disparaging the UK contribution to the war in Afghanistan, that is just disgusting, uninformed and uncalled for in my opinion. It is the sort of bullshit I would expect from Darla, not from you!!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10629358

If you have a problem with Darla, you're talking to the wrong person to talk about it with.

Your comments are almost childish. Gaddafi didn't have the opportunity????

He's been in power for 40 years. What the hell do you mean that he didn't have the opportunity?

Most importantly, fuck the colonialist UK contribution, fuck the UK. They are like our puppy dog that the US trains to do our bidding whenever and wherever we tell it to.

You're real anxious to see American troops committed to needless wars for profit .. while we lead our puppy nation of England and it's sorry-ass contingent into battles like the destruction of Iraq.

What? You can talk shit about other nations, but oh the outrage when I talk about England?

I suggested to you that there was nothing to gain for either of us with this conversation.

I hate colonialism and the needless for-profit destruction of human life and societies.

I don't know how much more clear or plain I can say that to you.
 
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